Windows XP dual boot- bootloader?

[merlyn]

Oh Great Linux Masters, I,Merlyn, humble myself before your great knowledge. Has anybody out there done an NHF on dual booting Windows XP and Linux? Anybody have a "How I did it?" I am specifically looking for help with a 2 hard drive set up, WindowsXP on one drive and 'Drake 8.1 on another. Can LILO or grub boot XP? XP is a completely new area to me. Thanks people!!!
-merlyn
PS: Craig, The Partition Magician: recomended partition schemes for XP???? :rolleyes:

[bdl]

LILO can indeed load XP, I have it loading on my system here. Not sure about GRUB. A partitioning scheme for a dual-boot XP/Linux setup might look like this:

/dev/hda1 - NTFS - WinXP - entire drive

/dev/hdc1 - SWAP - Mandrake - 128MB
/dev/hdc2 - '/var' - Mandrake - 500MB
/dev/hdc3 - '/' - Mandrake - remainder of drive


Install XP, then install Linux. Mandrake is pretty good about figuring out your system setup and *should* recognize the XP partition, add it to the bootloader config.

[merlyn]

Thanks!! I'll give it a try. :p

[bdl]

I should warn you ahead of time - make sure there's nothing on the drive you need to keep prior to doing this, and ALWAYS MAKE A LINUX BOOTDISK DURING THE INSTALL!!

[merlyn]

Ok. Thanks for the heads up.
-merlyn

[lilrabbit129]

I have the exact set-up!

I just run GRUB to boot everything. It will boot XP and Drake.

yeah... MAKE A BOOTDISK!

[SUOrangeman]

Since anything Windows-based will *NOT* give you the choice of MBR control (it will just ooverwrite the MBR instead), you can use BootPart (www.winimage.com -> boorpart) to add bootable non-Windows OSes/partitions to the NT loader.

-SUO